Word: clef
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...fact, Carrie still blames herself for the fact that her father left the family when she was two years old. "I'm still reeling from it," says Fisher. "It makes an impression on you." Still, any references to Dad are conspicuously missing from the self-avowed roman a clef. "My route to intimacy is routine," writes Fisher's fictional protagonist. "I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they're not there." Looks like this is one case where absence did not make the heart grow fonder...
...just got to wonder how calculating some movie studies are. Take the movie Heartburn, with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, two of the most acclaimed actors today. Mike Nichols, one of the eighties' hottest directors, controlled the process; and the screenplay was taken from a best-selling roman a clef by Nora Ephron, the former wife of big-shot Washington journalist Carl Bernstein. Hmmmm. Yeah, you know the producers were dreaming of a blockbuster and nine Academy awards from the moment they started shooting. With all that build-up, you've got to be disappointed...
...Music Construction Set (MCS) program ($40 for the Apple II, with Atari and Commodore 64 versions to come), the joy stick controls a movable hand on the video screen that picks up notes, sharps, clef signs and other music symbols, and sets them down on a staff. At any time, the computer will play them back so the user can hear how they sound. Up to 1,400 symbols can be displayed on two staffs, from whole notes to 1/32 notes, from simple melodies to six-voice chords...
...will. Sheed is one of the wittiest novelists, capable of turning out presumptive romans à clef like Office Politics (about a certain liberal magazine or magazines) and Max Jamison (about a certain theater critic or critics). In the new book he mixes the storyteller's phrase with the historian's acuity: "The '20s did not entirely take place in the '20s"; President Ford is "like a relative you have to visit now and then, with nothing much to report. You know, he's still working at Prudential or Tool & Dye"; William F. Buckley...
...plot that Snow the ex-physicist unfolds in this posthumously published work of nonfiction is better than any that Snow the novelist invented in his romans à clef like The Search and The New Men. There is something marvelously Dickensian, for instance, about Ernest Rutherford, whose booming voice upset such sensitive instruments as Niels Bohr, the Henry James of atomic physics, who whispered his way through labyrinths of elegant theory to explain what Rutherford demonstrated. Then, with Einstein ("the best company of all the great physicists") hovering above the scene, the rest of Snow's pantheon is Introduced...